Thursday, March 27, 2008

It's time for the classics. The 2008 Paris-Roubaix takes place on Sunday April 13th 2008.

To make it a little more interesting, why not include some wagers...

$10 entry fee. 100% of the entry fees go to the Jason Lapierre Scholarship fund at the UofC. The winner of the contest gets a tax receipt for the full amount of the total entry fees (winner takes all!). The winner also gets EXTREME boasting rights.

Contest details:

1. Simple... pick 5 riders, any order. (it doesn't matter the order of your riders, if they finish in the top 5, you get the points).2. Email your picks to dukyle at yahoo.ca

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Some details regarding the barbeque. I was thinking about having a theme for the event. To celebrate the summer of mega concerts and good racing, I was thinking that everyone should wear really cool concert shirts, wife beaters or ripped jeans. I'm kidding. I am pretty excited that I am going to see Megadeth and Iron Maiden within a month of each other though!

Menu is to be burgers and smokies, I will have salads and all the fixings. some chips and other snack stuff as well.

My address is 33 Arbour Stone Rise NW, phone is 366-6119. I'm not as savy with the computer so I wasn't able to put a map in here, and my wife is nagging me to help with breakfast!

Everyone is invited and bring your kids. If you have any special diet requirements please let me know in advance. The night is still April 5th and start coming at 4:30-5:00.

Friday, March 21, 2008

The plan is to drive out to Cochrane and meet in Mitford Park at 11am. We will ride up Grand Valley road to the TT courses and GPS the second one, as that still is required. The ride will be a steady effort with no sprinting, as we got our week's worth of sprinting today :)

Leave a comment if you can come so we know to wait for you at the parking lot.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

I'm creating a series of ads marketing bakeware towards athletic men for a school project. I need to do a bit of market research so I created a quick (and super fun) survey. If you have a couple couple seconds, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

A small group is heading out from the Mac's on old Banff Coach Road (at the west edge of the city) at 10:30am. The plan is to meander out through Brag Creek and a bit beyond for roughly 4 hrs of riding. The pace shouldn't be too hot (avg 30kph or so), so all are welcome.

Triathletes with cars love to advertise their perverse inclinations on their vehicles, and the "Swim Run Bike" sticker is one of the more popular ways they do it. I suspect I must have some form of dyslexia though, because all I see is "Dork Dork Dork." Generally though it's unnecessary for them to display their proclivities in bumper sticker form since it's pretty obvious when a vehicle belongs to a triathlete. It's usually some kind of "sporty" dork-tastic SUV, and it's usually got either a trunk rack or one of those roof racks that clamp the bike on the downtube because they don't know how to take their front wheels off. Or if they're hardcore they're driving an Isuzu IronMan, the car that looks like it might burrow itself somewhere in your unmentionables.

Let's be honest--triathletes are creepy. There's just something wishy-washy about the way they flirt awkwardly with three disciplines. They're like David Bowie's sexuality, or like people who grew up in multiple countries and who can speak three languages, yet they speak each one poorly and with an untraceable accent. "Swim Bike Run?" "Avoid Avoid Avoid."

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Tonight is the scheduled second ride for us. Last week we had some tough wind and reduced light. We were able to leave the parking lot at Walmart and head towards Burma Road then road west to Woodland road and headed home on the 1A. If there are no objections we could do the same tonight.

Please leave a comment or email Dan if you are able to attend, the plan is to leave the lot by 7:05pm and get a good hour in of drafting practice and some pace line riding.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Rob has included a great resource for us to the right of this post. It will show all the upcoming ST events / races / clinics / and scheduled training rides for us. Right now we have loaded up all the races.

As a club, we are going to 'target' several races over the season that it would be awesome most of the club could make it to. There is nothing like racing as a team, and considering our awesome roster, this is your opportunity.

Here are our target races, write them into your calender and get pumped:

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Friday, March 14, 2008

Here is a great response (IMO) to a question from a 'winning' coach. I really advocate for myself knowing my body well and responding to it. Powermeters (and the like) are great, but they must be taken in context as to their function as a tool. Recently I stopped listening to my body, as some of you witnessed, and I really payed the price. This compromised my training quality, consistency, and frequency. People always think I am 'going hard all the time' and say to me; 'Oh, I can't train like you, since you go hard all the time'. This couldn't be farther from the truth, but I suppose if you look at my workouts as individual events and not as an overall scheme, it may seem this way to some. What I DO do is try to elicit a training response from every session. Joel reiterates this below:

Slowtwitch: What are your feelings about rest days and how they should be incorporated?

Joel: I recommend that athletes only rarely take complete days off, at least deliberately. I don’t prescribe traditional work-rest cycles within micro cycles or across training blocks such as the classic 3/1 or 2/1 build/rest weeks. For the level of athletes I work with a light day will still have one, two or even three training sessions, but even for working age groupers I still prefer to spread the workload over the full week rather than have one or more complete rest or recovery days. By varying the energy systems worked each day an athlete can accomplish some quality every day and still be able to recover well. For this approach to be most effective, athletes have to be well tuned into their body’s responses, so if they are feeling like the quality is not going to happen on that day they can shift the focus of the workout to something they can accomplish in that session. This is a flexible approach to recovery, that allows for more quality training to be accomplished over time, compared to a more rigid, scheduled rest, whether you really need it or not approach.

Here is a link to Joel's blog to follow his athlete's run up to the Olympics!

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

A group of our Cat5ers met last Thursday to discuss several things. Here are the minutes to the meeting.

-----------------------------------------For us to become a dominant force in the peleton we will be focusing on the following points.1. Riding skills, group rides will be continuous practice sessions of drafting and pacelines. Once everyone is confident with those skills and everyone’s fitness gets as high as Stephen’s, we can than start practicing some basic tactical moves from the pacelines.2. Purpose of the ride, group rides will be slower pace, specific to aerobic zone training. This will also allow us to practice the skills we need for domination.3. Skill night, we all thought that it was a great idea to meet one night a week and work on skills for a shorter ride at research park or just past Trev’s house in Royal Oak. We were thinking of meeting in the Walmart parking lot and then riding to the non busy roads near Bearspaw.4. We also agreed that we would monitor the pace of riders and that for us to be successful we have to ride together and train together. If riders want to challenge the big dog cat 3 and 4 guys then they can, they will not be driving the pace of the cat 5 guys to catch up to them though. There was real discussion on how we would treat the non conforming riders who want to antagonize, I could assume it won’t be pretty!

Monday, March 10, 2008

Everyone, Tuesday night will be the first CAT 5 ride. We will be leaving from the Walmart in Royal Oak and heading towards Bearspaw and maybe Road 564. We are going to work on some of the skills that we discussed in the meeting last week. Tomorrow's focus will be on drafting and riding in a pace line.

Departure Time is 7:05 pm at the latest, I am unable to check the blog site during the day due to NetNanny (that cow!) Everyone else is welcome to join, the pace of the ride will be aerobic so that we can concentrate on skill development not ego embellishment.

My work email is sigouind@cohos-evamy.com if you need to get more information.

The ABA told me today that they will be processing our licenses and wehould have them by either the end of this week or early next week.

James, Alex, Dan and Rob scoped out some great race courses for our 2 TTs we will be hosting on July 12th. If you would like to be part of the planning and add you own touch to what we hope will be a great event, don't hesistant to get a hold of one of us. Please remember that all club members are expected to at least volunteer that day, so you may as well have some say in the race you'll be volunteering at !

We'll plan some group rides up in the area so you all get familiar with the routes. They are good ones.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Sunday Road Ride meet at Cochrane, Mitford Park Parking lot at 10:30.We will be riding Horse Creek Road. This will be a BASE PACE ride approx distance 80km maybe a little more or a little less. As well we will be scoping out race routes so there will be a few stops along the way.

Friday, March 7, 2008

Since Saturday is supposed to be a beautiful day all day I'm going to get out for 80kms or so in the morning before my 2 hour run. I'll be leaving from the corner of 69th street and Lower Springbank Road (gravel parking lot) at 8:30am. Anyone is welcome - this won't be a hammerfest, just a moderate spin. I hope to see a few people out there!

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

In case you didn’t know, training with power is all the rage. In fact, Joe Friel likens getting a power meter to a person with weak eyesight donning his first pair of glasses. Of course, the reality is that riding with a power meter is more like having sex with an electrocardiogram, in that it takes the fun out of the whole enterprise and buffets you with data you don’t really need. Physical sensation will guide you through your ride the same way it guides you through sex, and if you can’t do either without electronics it’s possible you have a problem that technology by itself may be insufficient to address.

His blog entry may be found here. It is a sarcastic blog and should be read in that vein of thinking.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Rob is currently cooking up a funky-fresh playlist for Wed. nights spinnorama. Thanks Rob in advance.

After the spin, ST Cycling has a meeting with the Crankmasters to discuss our race on July 12th and how it will intertwine with their Stampede RR on July 13th. If anyone has an extra few moments and is interested in listening and contributing to the discussion, please plan on sticking around. If you would like to have an active role in volunteering to help organize this event, we would love to hear about it!